Russian/Prepositions

Prepositions are small words that precede a phrase and connect it to the rest of the sentence. Example of prepositions in English include 'He went in the shop', 'She spoke about him, 'They went by the shops', etc. Russian prepositions work just like their English counterparts, with one important difference: they all place the next phrase in one of the six grammatical cases. As such, a good understanding of the Russian case system is needed to use prepositions. Some cases are used primarily or even entirely with prepositions, while others are used more in their main function than with prepositions- this page assumes familiarity of Russian cases and pronunciation.

In order to distinguish between в and на to mean in, a rule can be "if one can inhabit or enter a space where something is happening, it is на" and otherwise it is в. However, this rule is so general it is better to say this: one must learn the different nouns which take one or the other.

Like in German, some prepositions can have 2 cases. The accusative (again, like in German) and the genitive cases are used to express movement: accusative pertains to destination, while genitive indicates the source of movement. The instrumental and the Prepositional are used to express staticness.